


Two Swords

by aelangreenleaf



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family Feels, Feels, Gen, Post 8.04, Season/Series 08 Spoilers, a sort of fix-it?, some liberties with seeing the past were taken in writing this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-28 23:18:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18766345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aelangreenleaf/pseuds/aelangreenleaf
Summary: She’s always known that her mother has two swords.She asks the castellan one afternoon why knights have more than one sword. He tells her that not all knights carry two swords – he says it’s personal choice, one to be weighed between the advantages of having a second sword as backup should the first be taken from you, and the risk that someone might steal the second sword and use it against you.“Why do you ask, my lady?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.“Mother has two swords, Ser,” she says softly, “the one she wears on her hip, and the one she keeps in her room.”His face clouds then, but he quickly recovers. “Ah, my lady, that is something different."





	Two Swords

**Author's Note:**

> Like many others, I have a lot of feelings post 8.04. I'm elated that Jaime/Brienne is canon now, but devastated that Jaime left. 
> 
> This is my attempt to make sense of the post 8.04 mess. I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> [I took some liberties with the idea of magic in Westeros, but not much.]

She’s always known that her mother has two swords.

She asks the castellan one afternoon why knights have more than one sword. He tells her that not all knights carry two swords – he says it’s personal choice, one to be weighed between the advantages of having a second sword as backup should the first be taken from you, and the risk that someone might steal the second sword and use it against you.

“Why do you ask, my lady?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Mother has two swords, Ser,” she says softly, “the one she wears on her hip, and the one she keeps in her room.”

His face clouds then, but he quickly recovers. “Ah, my lady, that is something different. Some swords are meant to be kept as… mementos. Family heirlooms.” He clears his throat, and motions her towards the door. “Hurry on, Lady Catelyn, your mother would not like it if you were late for dinner.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

She begs her mother to let her train with a _real_ sword, not just a blunted edge or a wooden one. She is ten years old, old enough to hold a real blade in her hands, and she tells her mother as much.

Her mother smiles at her, nodding in amused agreement. “Hold out your hand.”

She watches as her mother unsheathes the great sword on her belt, the beautiful steel gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. The lion on the pommel has always entranced her – it seems to roar and growl and move as the blade is swung, a great beast gnashing its teeth as it prepares to fight. Her mother kneels down beside her, taking Catelyn’s hand and placing the grip of the blade between her palm and her fingers. Her mother’s blue eyes look into hers, warm encouragement in their depths.

Catelyn takes a deep breath, her heart pounding in her chest. She’s dreamt of this day – dreamt of holding the lion blade, of wielding Oathkeeper, of making her mother proud.  Her fingers wrap around the handle, she sets her jaw firm, and begins to move the blade.

She gasps, shocked, as her arm cries out in pain, and she nearly drops the sword in her surprise. “It’s _so_ heavy,” she breathes, looking up to her mother.

Ser Brienne of Tarth nods. “Real steel, especially Valyrian steel, is very heavy, my love.”

She can feel her cheeks burn red with embarrassment. She really thought she was ready, she thought she was strong enough, she thought she was _brave_ enough. Her eyes sting with sudden tears, and she squeezes them shut, ashamed.

She feels her mother gently take the sword back, hears it as it is sheathed once more into its scabbard. She feels her mother’s warm fingers on her cheeks, brushing away her tears. “You’ll be ready soon, little one. I didn’t hold a real blade until I was eleven, and even then, it hurt my arms to hold it aloft. No one is born a knight, you have to _become_ one.”

“Real knights don’t cry,” Catelyn says bitterly, so ashamed of her tears, so ashamed to be so weak.

Her mother frowns, leans in to capture Catelyn’s face between both of her broad hands. “Never think that,” she tells her forcefully. “A real knight knows all emotion, Catelyn. A real knight cries and laughs and loves. Never forget that.” Her mother’s blue eyes shine bright, boring down into her own.

She nods, swallows the shame away, and rushes forward to collapse into her mother’s arms.

 

* * *

 

 

That night, Catelyn has odd dreams.

 _She is somewhere strange, somewhere warm and bright, but it isn’t Tarth, it isn’t_ home. _There’s a big, round table with a big, thick book, and there’s a man standing in front of her, a man in soft brown leather, with blonde hair and new scars upon his face. He’s holding a sword –_ Mother’s sword! – _resting it upon his golden hand, holding out to the person in front of him._

_She looks behind her and sees her mother, sees her mother as she must have once been, young and guarded and nervous. She hears her mother’s voice as she takes the blade from the man, hears the awe in her words as she takes the Valyrian steel blade._

_“It’s yours,” the man says, his green eyes staring at her mother, and all at once Catelyn understands._

She wakes up in shock, sweat pouring off of her, her breath stolen from her chest. She’s never seen her father before, never seen what he looks like. When she tries to imagine him, tries to form him in her mind’s eye he always slips away, never able to see what he might have looked like had he lived. She’s asked her mother before, _what was he like?_ , and her mother always looks so sad when she speaks of him, so… broken, and so Catelyn stopped asking.

She sees an afterimage of him now, a tall man in a leather coat, handsome and blonde and tan. She tries to memorize his face, the scars and the laugh lines and those bright green eyes. She knows those eyes, knows them from the mirror. She knows them as her own.

 

* * *

 

 

Weeks pass, and she doesn’t have the same dreams again, and she finds herself longing for them. Whether it had been a dream or a delusion or a vision, she doesn’t care, she just wants to see her father again, she wants to see who he was, she wants to see the man she’ll never get to meet. She tries to figure out why, why that night did she dream of him?

Training one day in the yard, knocking the cook’s son down into the mud with her wooden sword, it comes to her.

She waits until her mother is in the middle of putting her armour on one morning, when her back is turned. Catelyn doesn’t even take the sword out of its scabbard, she just grabs the grip with both hands and closes her eyes, feeling the blade beneath her fingers. She holds on as long as she can, until she hears her mother begin to turn around, and she reluctantly lets go.

 

* * *

 

 

_She is in a battle, and she is terrified._

_The world is dark and cold and loud and terrifying. Snow drops from the sky and a cold wind chills her to the bone, as she is deafened by the sound of metal hitting metal, metal hitting flesh, people crying and screaming and moaning all around her. She is so scared, so frightened, that she closes her eyes and tries to disappear._

_She hears it then, a cry in the darkness. A woman’s cry, a scream of pain and terror. She opens her eyes, forces herself to find that voice, and sees in that moment her mother in full battle armour, Oathkeeper swinging through the air, cutting through wave after wave of stinking, putrid bodies. She gasps as her mother is tackled, pushed down onto the ground by the hordes of the undead, their decaying hands clawing at her mother’s chest plate, at her mother’s arms, at her legs. Catelyn rushes forward without thinking, crying out for her mother, desperate to save her –_

_But there’s someone else there now, a figure in dark leather and armour, a brilliant blade in his one good hand, cutting down the dead between him and her mother. Her mother screams and his sword moves faster, slicing through body after body until he reaches her._

_Catelyn knows this same man as before – he is older now, older and bearded and greying, but his green eyes still burn so brightly as he looks down at her mother, making sure she is safe._

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t know why the sword makes her dream like it does, but she doesn’t care. All Catelyn knows is that when she touches the sword, when she holds Oathkeeper in her hands, she _sees_ something that should be impossible, sees things that happened long before she was born. Sometimes she only sees her mother – she sees her mother fight and spar and rest, and she sees other people that she knows. She sees Podrick Payne, sees him as a young squire, helping her mother. She sees Lady Sansa, Warden of the North, terrified and cold as her mother fights for her. She sees faces she doesn’t know but names that she does, names like Queen Daenerys and Jon Snow and Lyanna Mormont and Arya Stark.

She lives for her dreams, lives for the moments where she can see her father and her mother together, fighting and sparring and talking. She watches him give her Oathkeeper, watches him tell her to keep it, watches him fight next to her mother on a battlefield full of the dead. But there are no memories of him past the north, no dreams of him when she sees her mother in the south with Lady Sansa, or at the great dragonpit, or on the ship to Tarth.

And then one dark night, the dreams stop. She tries again and again, touching Oathkeeper behind her mother’s back, holding it against her chest, _willing_ the dreams to come to her again, but they don’t come back. Her sleep is dreamless, her nights empty, and she wakes in the morning with a sadness so deep in her chest she can scarcely breathe.

And then she remembers her mother’s second sword.

 

* * *

 

 

She has _never_ seen her mother touch the other sword, but Catelyn suspects that she does. The sword is kept in her mother’s bedroom, mounted on the wall beside her bed, always polished to incredible brightness, the rubies on the pommel glinting in the candlelight. She imagines her mother here in the evenings, the sword in her lap, her strong hands gentle as she cleans and cares for the blade.

Catelyn knows now that she’s seen this sword before. She’s seen it cut through the armies of the dead, red gems flashing as the blade slices through enemy skin, always fighting to get to her mother. She’s seen it in the scabbard on her father’s belt, his golden hand brushing against it as he walks.

She wonders if she can dream of him again.    

 

* * *

 

 

One evening she feigns illness at the dinner table, and she feels terrible guilt as her mother worriedly checks on her. She never lies to her mother, and it does not feel like a good habit to start. Her mother sends her off to bed, telling her to get some rest, and Catelyn keeps her eyes down as she leaves so that her mother doesn’t see her the guilt in her face.

She sneaks into her mother’s room, and stands on a chair so she can touch the sword. She wonders what it is called, if it has a great and honourable name like Oathkeeper.

 

* * *

 

 

_There is a boy with a crown, and a terrible smile. His smile is all poison and hatred, a twisted grimace masquerading as mirth. He is blonde and fair [and horrifyingly familiar], and he takes the sword out for the first time, swinging it in the air. He slams it down into a table, chopping a book in half, and the people at the table recoil in fear. He smirks as brings down the blade over and over again, slicing through the pages until the book is nothing but paper scraps and torn leather, destroyed beyond recognition._

_He calls out to the crowd, asks them what name it should have. He smiles as he hears a name he likes: Widow’s Wail._

_“Everytime I use it, it’ll be like cutting off Ned Stark’s head all over again.”_

When she wakes, she vomits into her chamberpot, her stomach roiling with disgust.

 

* * *

 

 

“Was my father a good man?” she asks her mother as they walk along the beach, the sand warm and soft between her toes.

Her mother’s reply is slow to come, careful and measured. “He was.”

“Was he always a good man?”

Her mother draws in a deep breath, closes her eyes. She kneels down in the sand next to her daughter, and pulls her close. “People are good and bad all at once, little one. People are capable of great things and terrible things and sometimes they do both. I will not lie to you – your father did terrible things. But he did great things as well, things that cost him. Things that destroyed him.”

She can see the tears on her mother’s cheeks, sinking into the sand beneath them, and Catelyn pulls her mother in close, pulls her into her small arms.

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t like Widow’s Wail, not after seeing the blonde boy with the acid in his voice and hatred in his eyes. But she wants to dream again, wants to see her father’s face. Wants to hear his voice, even if only for a little while.

_She dreams of a mostly empty room, a room lit by firelight. There are chairs around a fire, and there are men sitting there. There’s a familiar face – Pod – and there’s an older man missing the tips of his fingers, a man in thick furs with fiery hair and deep blue eyes, and then there’s a short man with blonde hair, and she recognizes something in his face too. He looks familiar._

_She looks past them, looks to see what they are all staring at, and she sees them. She sees her mother kneeling in full armour, eyes bright and hopeful, and she sees her father, tall and proud in the firelight. Catelyn thinks that he looks like a knight in the stories and the songs, honorable and just and fair. He has Widow’s Wail in his grasp, his fingers dancing on the grip of the blade, as he touches the steel onto her mother’s shoulders and makes her a knight._

_She watches them look at each other, stare at each other, and she knows now for certain that they loved each other._

She wakes up with her eyes filled with tears.

 

* * *

 

 

Every afternoon, she trains. She trains until her shoulders seize up, trains until she sways on her feet. Over and over and over again, she swings her sword, she practices her footwork, she perfects her stance.

She trains so that she can be a knight like her mother, like her father. She trains so that she can be the greatest knight the world has seen, the daughter of two knights. She trains for them.

 

* * *

 

 

_She sees her father fight the undead. She sees her father fight dragons. She sees her father in gleaming red and gold armour in the full light of the sun, and in dull brown leathers in the snow and the cold and the dark. She sees him ride north, and she sees him ride south again. She sees his green eyes, tormented and pained – she sees the steel beneath them, the resolve as he rides into the mouth of the beast._

_She wishes she could have known him. She wishes he could have known her_.

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you think… do you think he would have loved me?” she whispers to her mother one evening, as she brushes Catelyn’s long blonde hair in silence, with only the soft sound of the waves hitting the castle walls far below.

Her mother presses her to her chest, and Catelyn hears her mother’s voice break. “He would have loved you, little one. He would have been proud of you.”

That night, she falls asleep in her mother’s arms.

 

* * *

 

 

_She can smell smoke, she can smell fire and destruction and death._

_She is in a tower somewhere, high above the city below. There are screams in the air around her, rising up in the billowing smoke, surrounding her. She looks around the room, around the broken table and the collapsing walls, and she sees them._

_There is a woman on the ground, a beautiful woman with blonde hair, a bright red gash across her beautiful pale neck. There is a man slumped beside her, a familiar man with greying hair and a greying beard, an aging lion approaching death. He is bleeding out onto the floor, wounds in his arms and his chest and his legs. There is a sword across his lap, a sword with rubies and a stag, the steel stained red. He is whispering something, murmuring to himself as he lies in a pool of his own blood._

_She comes closer, straining to hear._

_“Brienne,” he whispers, his lips barely moving. “Brienne, I…”_

_She gasps, and his emerald eyes move. They strain and blink and focus on her._

_“Who…?” he says, his voice cracking from the pain._

_She blinks away tears [how can she cry in a dream?], kneels down beside him. She says nothing, takes his hand into hers, wrapping her fingers around his own. She is shocked to feel them, to really_ feel _them, and she never wants to let go._

_His eyes blur, lose focus, and then meet hers again. “Your eyes,” he whispers, trailing off as he stares into them._

_She nods, squeezing his hand._

_He groans in pain, tries to shift himself back up, but slumps back down, his strength leaving him. “If… if you see Ser Brienne of Tarth, tell… tell her,” he whispers, his breath a wheeze now, a straining wet gasp. “I loved her. I love her still. I’ll always love her.”_

_She can barely see past the tears, her breath caught in her chest._

_His hand leaves hers, comes up to her face. His touches her cheek, his eyes full of sudden realization, and she leans into it, leans into her father’s embrace._

_“You look like her, beautiful like her,” he murmurs, his eyes struggling to focus. “But your eyes… your eyes are like mine.”_

_And then his hand drops, drops down to the floor, drops into the blood beneath him, and his eyes flutter shut for the last time._

 

* * *

 

 

She wakes up sobbing, sobbing and screaming. Her mother is there in an instant, quietly telling the servants to go back to bed, to not worry.

Catelyn folds herself into her mother’s arms, hides inside her mother’s wide and warm embrace, and cries until the tears stop coming, her mother’s nightgown soaked through with her pain and her sadness.

She looks up at her mother, looks into those deep blue eyes, and tells her of her dreams. She tells her everything, tells her about Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail, about the battle against the dead, and the gift of the sword, and the knighting ceremony in the firelight. She tells her about the evil boy king, and about the battle against the wild horsemen and the dragon, tells her about the ride north and the ride back south again.

Her mother is shocked at first, disbelieving, but the more Catelyn tells her the more she sees in her mother’s face that these were not just dreams, not just figments of her imagination. These things happened, _really_ happened, long before Catelyn was born.

They talk until dawn, wrapped up in each other’s embrace, and when the first light shines through her window, when the first birds start singing their morning songs, she tells her mother about the last dream. The tall tower, the blood. The dead woman on the ground. Her father, and her father’s words. [ _I loved her. I love her still. I’ll always love her.]_

Catelyn has rarely seen her mother cry, but she holds her mother’s hand as she sobs. She remembers her mother’s words: _a real knight cries and laughs and loves_.

She thinks again of her father and her mother, two knights in the firelight, staring at each other. Two true knights, who felt pain and love and fear.

Two Knights of the Seven Kingdoms, she thinks to herself. Two knights for the stories and the songs.

**Author's Note:**

> FWIW, this is for me like when Bran cried out for his father at the Tower of Joy, and Ned looked around like he could hear something.
> 
> I think when Jaime is dying, he does see his daughter there. And he gets to die at peace.


End file.
